Learning GraphQL

Chapter 4. Designing a Schema

GraphQL is going to change your design process. Instead of looking at your APIs as a collection of REST endpoints, you are going to begin looking at your APIs as collections of types. Before breaking ground on your new API, you need to think about, talk about, and formally define the data types that your API will expose. This collection of types is called a schema.

Schema First is a design methodology that will get all of your teams on the same page about the data types that make up your application. The backend team will have a clear understanding about the data that it needs to store and deliver. The frontend team will have the definitions that it needs to begin building user interfaces. Everyone will have a clear vocabulary that they can use to communicate about the system they are building. In short, everyone can get to work.

To facilitate defining types, GraphQL comes with a language that we can use to define our schemas, called the Schema Definition Language, or SDL. Just like the GraphQL Query Language, the GraphQL SDL is the same no matter what language or framework you use to construct your applications. GraphQL schema documents are text documents that define the types available in an application, and they are later used by both clients and servers to validate GraphQL requests.

In this chapter, we take a look at the GraphQL SDL and build a schema for a photo sharing application.

Defining Types

The best way to learn about GraphQL types and ...